Left field question for Odysseus
16 Feb 2007 4:54:08 UTC
Topic 192441
(moderation:
What is the picture in your avatar? After not really looking at it closely for months, I have suddenly come to realise it's not a hippo
It really does kind of look like a hippo, late at night, after a hard day staring at numbers, blindfolded at 200 paces.....
No Freudian reason I can think of for misinterpreting your avatar. :)
Left field question for Odysseus
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Hi Magenta,
I asked about the image too. The reply from Odysseus is here.
Great choice for an avatar's image. I found the subject matter so interesting that I tried doing a sort of 'false color & time-lapse' animation to illustrate the variability. The file's just over 6 MB, too long to post on ImageShack, so I started a website. Not ready for prime time, still a work in progress, quite amateur; I had been wanting to redo it more properly, before showing it to Odysseus, but finding the time hasn't been easy lately. :)
There is a book, "Monsters in
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There is a book, "Monsters in the sky" by Paolo Maffei (MIT Press), which devotes a whole chapter to Eta Carinae. The book wea translated by Riccardo Giacconi before getting his Nobel Prize. I know this because I edited the first edition of the book in 1976. Many years have passed and new discoveries have been made on Eta Carinae.
Tullio
RE: Hi Magenta, I asked
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Thanks for posting the link. It was interesting (to me, anyway :) ) that the word "homunculus" was used, given the particular connotations of that word, around the creation of artificial "human" life. And "hippo" is just so much easier to spell LOL.
:) :)
RE: There is a book,
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The title of the book sounds interesting, would you mind providing a synopsis?
RE: The title of the book
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The book follows Maffei's first book, "Beyond the Moon", which describes the Universe starting from the Solar System outwards. It was also published by MIT Press around 1978. "Monsters" describes a series of celestial objects which do not belong to the "normal" classes of stars, planets, satellites in our Galaxy and in other galaxies. There is a chapter on comets, another on possible new planets in the outer Solar System, one on relics of supernovae explosions,one on Eta Carinae. one on black holes and a final one on quasars. Of course many new developments have occured since 1978 but the book is still valid today.
Tullio